By: Rafael Pelayo, MD
Rightly so, term limits call for new blood. This is the end of my time serving on the Board of the California Sleep Society (“CSS”). It has been a memorable and professionally rewarding eight years. I was first elected in January 2016. What I liked the most was working with the other board members to organize our annual meeting. Our monthly conference (and later Zoom) calls were mostly taken up with meeting planning. Often, it felt like we were throwing a party for your nerdiest friends to celebrate and learn about our favorite topic—sleep. After all, love of sleep health and science is what brings us together every year. On the Board, we always tried to outdo the prior meeting by raising the bar of the educational content while at the same time never losing sight that we needed to host a fun event that would also represent a good value for our Members hard-earned income. At times it was stressful, having to guarantee payment to various meeting venues, working out all of the logistical details with the myriads of uncertainties while not knowing who if anybody would show up to our meeting. I always felt a strong sense of relief and joy on the mornings of the first day of the meeting when members started arriving at the registration area. Because of our onsite same day registration option, we could never be sure how many people would ultimately show up but you, our Membership never disappointed us.
When I first joined the CSS board, the Father of Sleep Medicine, Dr. Bill Dement, warned me that various attempts at state-wide organizations had failed over the years throughout the country and to not be complacent about future of CSS. During my time on the Board, Dr. Dement passed away. CSS used our available resources to hold the first memorial service honoring his memory. Being the time of the pandemic, we held it via Zoom. Many friends and colleagues from throughout the world participated on very short notice. We even had the inventor of CPAP, Dr. Colin Sullivan join us from Australia to share his memories of Bill. Bill Dement did get to see CSS help lead the effort for California to be the first state in the nation to establish a law protecting the sleep health of adolescents, SB 328, which delayed the start of school times for our public schools. I can take some pride in knowing that my final year helping organize the meeting was also our highest attended meeting on record. Thank you to all of you that help make that happen. Now, please smash that record in 2025!
One of the reasons we can offer our Members a good educational value is that unlike many other medical conferences, we can keep our registration fees low by not paying an honorarium or most travel expenses to any of our speakers. Many professional meetings are much more expensive to attend because they have to spend thousands of dollars on speakers’ fees. Why are expert speakers with regional and nationally recognized excellence willing to participate in our meeting at their own expense? I think it starts with the reputation of our meeting and a desire to share what they know with our Membership audience. Our Society ethos of sleep technologists, physicians, and other professionals all being considered and treated as equals is part of the appeal for many of our participants. Alternating northern and southern meeting locations has allowed us to leverage our great educational institutions so our invited faculty does not have to travel far to speak at the meeting. Gratefully, we do get significant support from commercial companies that want to be able to interact with our Membership. We have a small, but very efficient support staff, to help us year-round stay on target, otherwise we would not have a quality meeting.
The reason we have term limits for our board is to give all of us an opportunity to serve and avoid stagnation. I am pleased some of my enthusiastic younger colleagues were recently elected to serve. If you are a Member of CSS, please consider volunteering for the Board of Directors. Although hundreds of people attend our annual meeting, very few actually vote during the Board elections. Only a dozen votes or less will often get a person elected. It should not be difficult for any of our Members to simply request their co-workers and colleagues to vote for them to receive sufficient votes. So, please help us maintain our healthy growth and help the California Sleep Society to continue to be your voice in all sleep related matters in our State.